[ozswede]

Driver fined $195,796 for speeding in Finland, where penalties are based on income

A driver has been fined 121,000 euros ($195,796) for speeding in Finland, where such penalties are based an offender's income. (Ouch!)

"I really regret the matter," Anders Wiklöf was quoted as saying in the main newspaper for the Åland Islands, an autonomous region of Finland in the Baltic Sea.

Mr Wiklöf was driving 82 kilometres per hour in a 50kph zone when police stopped and fined him on Saturday.

Along with getting the fine, he had his drivers licence suspended for 10 days, the Nya Åland newspaper reported.


Speeding fines in Finland generally total about half of an offender's daily income.

It is not the first time Mr Wiklöf has been caught speeding.

In 2018, he was fined 63,680 euros. And he had to cough up 95,000 euros five years earlier.

A native of Åland, Mr Wiklöf is chairman of a holding company that includes businesses in the logistics, helicopter services, real estate, trade and tourism sectors.

In Finland, traffic violation fines are based on a driver's daily disposable income – generally their daily salary halved.

Mr Wiklöf's company, Wiklöf Holding, is worth more than $10 million, according to ZoomInfo.

The Åland Islands sit at the entrance to the Gulf of Bothnia, between the Finnish city of Turku, on mainland Finland's west coast, and Sweden's capital of Stockholm.

[HogwartsExpress]

Family finds 1 million copper pennies while cleaning out Los Angeles home


Having more money than you know what to do with is usually a good thing, but for one California family, it’s a little bit more complicated than that.

John Reyes, a realtor from the Inland Empire, is trying to figure out what to do with more than 1 million pennies he and his wife discovered in her father’s former home in the Pico-Union neighborhood of Los Angeles.

The pennies were found in a crawlspace way back in the basement of the home last year while the family was cleaning out the home that once belonged to John’s father-in-law, Fritz.

The home was built in the early 1900s, and the family believes it was once used as a bed and breakfast.

Fritz and his brother, both German immigrants, lived in the home for decades until Fritz passed and his brother moved away.

In the years since, John, his wife, Elizabeth, her sister, her cousin and their spouses, have been cleaning out the historic home with plans to renovate it for the next generation.

John recalls the arduous task of cleaning out the family home, which was filled to the brim with items of various levels of importance.

“They kept everything,” Reyes told KTLA, adding that it’s taken several years with their busy schedules to get the place clean and ready for renovations.

He says their cleaning job became a rescue mission one day last year while cleaning out the home’s basement. The crawlspace was tight, literally requiring members of the family to get on their knees to reach the deepest corners.

“We were trying to do a thorough job,” Reyes said, their attention to detail eventually leading them down a rabbit hole in which they never expected to find themselves.



At first, they stumbled upon some loose pennies, the paper rolls disintegrated from years of basement dwelling. Loose pennies led to crates, which led to boxes, which eventually led to the discovery of dozens of bank bags filled with an undetermined amount of pennies from decades ago.

“Some of the banks don’t even exist anymore,” Reyes said.

The discovery was exciting, but also led to the realization that they were stuck with hundreds of thousands of pennies, each bag weighing several pounds and needing to be pulled from the crawlspace and brought into the light for the first time in years.

They randomly selected three bags, grabbed multiple handfuls, and confirmed that the pennies were copper, not zinc, which the United States switched to in the 1980s.

They did some rough mathematics, weighing the bags of pennies and determining how much each bag held, and then stopped once they felt comfortable with an estimate: at least 1 million.

Next came the question that still rings true for Reyes and his wife’s family — what exactly do you do with a million pennies?

The immediate thought: cash out and be done with it.

“‘We’ve got to take these to Coinstar,'” Reyes recalled thinking at the time, but they quickly changed their minds. “We didn’t want to pay 8%, and there’s no way we can take these all the way [home] to Ontario.”

They began calling around banks in L.A. to see if any of them were interested.

One Wells Fargo branch said it was just too many pennies for them to take in. “‘I don’t even have the room in my vault,'” Reyes recalled a bank manager telling him. “‘Don’t bring them here.'”

So they were forced to pivot, hoping that their local bank in San Bernardino County would be more willing to work with them.

But first, they needed to get the pennies out of the basement and back to Ontario.

“Literally bag-by-bag, we had to take them out of the basement, up the stairs, and into the trucks … it took hours,” Reyes said. “It took a whole day just to get them out of the crawlspace.”

They used two trucks, one a Dodge Heavy Duty, loaded the pennies onto the axles of the truck beds, and watched as thousands of pounds of copper pennies exerted their weight on the trucks’ suspensions. They drove the sinking trucks in the slow lane all the way to Ontario, where the coins sat as they tried to figure out what to do next.

Again, they ran into a roadblock. Their local bank didn’t want to take the pennies either, urging Reyes and his extended family to go through them and search for any rarities.

Reyes begrudgingly agreed. “You see all these stories of people finding pennies worth $2 million,” he said. It only takes one rare coin to change everything, and they had ample opportunity to get lucky.

But they’ve already invested years into cleaning out Fritz and his brother’s old home and they’ve spent months dealing with the pennies. The family is ready for someone else to finish the journey, but they want to get a fair value for the possibility the pennies promise.

Reyes listed the coins on OfferUp, a popular resale app and website, asking for $25,000. If their estimate of 1 million pennies is accurate, that’s more than double the $10,000 value in normal currency.

They’ve received piecemeal offers from people interested in a portion of what treasures may be found in the depths of the bank bags, but no offers to take them completely out of their hands. One person offered the copper value, but that proved to be impractical and resource-heavy.

“The value is in the uniqueness,” Reyes said, and taking less than their full value would go against the ideals of his strong-willed father-in-law.

Fritz and his brother were German immigrants who Reyes described as “war babies,” who understood the importance of metals and materials.

When the nation switched from copper to zinc to press its pennies, Fritz saw an opportunity to help build generational wealth for his family.

Fritz, a well-known butcher who worked in Hollywood for years, would take his paychecks to the bank and purchase copper pennies, knowing their value would only go up in time.

He was “always worrying and best trying to position himself,” Reyes recalled.

Years after his death, Fritz and his brother are still looking out for his family, and Reyes intends to make sure their hard work pays off — even if it’s a headache in the meantime.

If you have the means, the desire, and an optimistic spirit, Reyes and his family are listening to offers. Although, you’ll probably have to figure out how to transport them yourself.

src: https://ktla.com/news/california/family ... eles-home/

[Fatima99]

Pufferfish Creating Beautiful Underwater Mandalas–A Scene of Pure Peace



Elaborate circles of sand and pebbles have been spotted off the coast of a Japanese island.

Prior to 2011, these strange, mandala-like circles found under the shallow sea were a mystery, and the identity of their architects was anything but expected.

They are constructed for an annual mating ritual by male white-spotted pufferfish, reports Japanese news. The 15-centimeter-long fish use their little fins to excavate the series of trenches during the mating season.

It takes the animal around 3 weeks to complete the sand mandala spawning nest, after which they escort the females there.

After this, they change professions from builders to protectors, guarding the eggs for 5 days until they hatch.

“We hope a great number of divers will be able to see the nests while following observation rules,” said Katsuki Oki, 52, head of the Amami Marine Life Research Association, who took excellent photographs of these nests on the Oshima Straight seabed off southwest Japan’s Amami-Oshima Island.

For centuries, whether with cooking implements or cars, the Japanese have been famous for their craftsmanship. Evidently, this trait extends to other branches of the tree of life on the famous islands.

[PennySerenade]

Canadian businessman walks across Europe to remove his carbon footprint



The man who introduced Coca-Cola to the Soviet Union and brought Cirque du Soleil to Russia is now engaging in rather extreme climate activism after a wake-up call late in his career.

Canadian entrepreneur Craig Cohon finished a 4,250-kilometre journey across Europe on Monday after walking for five months straight. He also drained his entire pension fund, which amounted to $1 million.

The reason: he wanted to remove his personal carbon footprint, which is equivalent to 8,147 tonnes of CO2 over his lifetime so far — an amount that is 28 times the global average.

Cohon calculated his carbon footprint — in other words, the amount of CO2 generated by his actions — with the help of an independent consultant, as outlined in the report by Fund Nature and MyCarbon.

Seeing how his consumerism, transcontinental business flights and meat-eating behaviour had inflated his footprint well beyond the average, Cohon decided to take action.

"I think that's a very interesting shift when you start to become aware of the carbon and you take action not only today, not only for the future, but also for the past," Cohon told CBC News while being chased by three large dogs on the Sultans Trail in Turkey.



The entrepreneur became more conscious of the environment after the COP26 UN climate conference in 2021. He soon realized that, for the damage he personally caused, it was time to Walk It Back, as his campaign name suggests.

He decided he would walk back his emissions by bringing attention to various solutions for permanently removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Cohon, who is based in London, U.K., departed from Trafalgar Square on Jan. 3 and made his way to the finish line on the morning of June 5, crossing Istanbul's Galata Bridge.

More than 70 people joined Cohon in support during his journey across 14 countries. They ranged from climate activists and NGO leaders to politicians and CEOs of global corporations.

"We think that walking is slow, but it's actually the fastest way to connect with another human," said Cohon.

"You're walking beside someone for eight hours and you're having a deep conversation, meeting grandmothers and local people. You're being called in and asked to sit down for a cup of tea, and listen to local issues around agriculture, building and air pollution."

Cohon was also accompanied on his trek by a recycled sea container that displayed an exhibition of examples of carbon-removal solutions. In the other half of the container, the entrepreneur spent his nights.

The container itself was transported on a regular gasoline-powered truck, after several attempts from the team to acquire an electric one.

"We tried so, so, so hard … however, the distances are just too big for the electric vehicle market at the moment," said Emily Benson, head of advocacy at Walk It Back. Benson noted that any CO2 emissions generated by the campaign will be added to "Cohon's carbon footprint that needs to be removed."

The Walk It Back campaign outlined several carbon-removal solutions. Benson said they range from nature-based initiatives such as afforestation and kelp and seaweed farming to more hybrid approaches, like the production of biochar.



Biochar is an organic product similar to charcoal that is rich in carbon. It is created through a process called pyrolysis, in which woody biomass is heated in the absence of oxygen.

"That charcoal can then be ground up and used in your agriculture or in your gardening. And actually, for every one tonne of biochar that is produced, you're looking at removing between two or three tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere," she added.

Other methods like direct air-capture are still in early development, however, such as plants that suck CO2 out of the air and mineralize it into rocks.

"There's one in Iceland and there's one in Switzerland permanently removing CO2 from our atmosphere," said Benson. "However, at the moment it is still expensive, so we'll need to reduce that cost going forward."

While Cohon's walk does not directly remove CO2 from the atmosphere, he said he hopes to raise enough awareness with the proposed solutions and collaborate with European cities that have a major impact in this field.

However, one climate expert believes it may be too soon to campaign for current carbon-removal technology.

"I'm always excited to see efforts that raise awareness about strategies that work when it comes to dealing with climate change," said Dr. Sarah Burch, Canada research chair in sustainability governance and innovation, who is also the executive director of the Waterloo Climate Institute in Ontario.

"But carbon dioxide removal, in particular direct-air capture, is a very niche technology that is not yet even remotely at the scale that would be necessary to meaningfully impact climate," she said.

Burch called for a larger focus on reducing the demand for fossil fuels and increasing the demand of solar, wind and other renewable energies, which she says are cheaper than ever before.

"We need to reduce our reliance on internal combustion engines, and get people into active transport like cycling and walking, [invest in] electrified mass transit and also electric vehicles," she said.

According to Burch, it is "absolutely crucial" to first focus on strategies for transportation, buildings, fossil fuel production and industrial processes for steel and cement.

While supporting the motive behind Cohon's initiative, Burch said there is a lot more work to be done to remove the businessman's personal carbon footprint.

"If he were to look at his investments, and what sort of fossil-fuel intensive industries those investments were supporting, the scale of emissions he's driving through those pathways absolutely dwarfs his personal emissions in terms of flights and food."

Cohon stated that reaching Istanbul is not the finish line for him. He has more plans for immersive campaigning, walking and lobbying governments on the importance of factoring the costs of carbon emissions into people's daily lives.

But before the entrepreneur goes on another journey, he will get some rest in Turkey as he arrived just in time for his 60th birthday.

"I will celebrate with a great massage and some of my family and friends around," said Cohon. "And this is just the end of the beginning for the campaign. We must get the cost of carbon into our economic system. People have to pay for it."

[Misstee]

Sotheby’s Sets Two Gemstone Records for a Ruby and a Pink Diamond, Each Selling for $34.8 Million

This is the first time in history that two stones have fetched prices north of $30 million in a single sale, the auction house notes.

Artnet News, June 8, 2023





otheby’s New York set two world records for gemstones today, one for a 55.22 carat Mozambique ruby known as the “Estrela de Fura 55.22” and one for a 10.57 carat fancy purplish-pink diamond referred to as “the Eternal Pink.” They fetched identical prices of $34.8 million.

It’s the first time in auction history that two stones have fetched prices north of $30 million in a single sale, the house points out, and the ruby set a record for any colored gemstone at auction. At about $3.3 million per carat, the pink diamond is a new price per carat for the color grade. Both lots were guaranteed to sell and backed by irrevocable bids.

“Today, we witnessed the historic sale of not one, but two of the most exquisite and important diamonds and gemstones to ever hit the auction block,” said Quig Bruning, head of Sotheby’s jewelry, Americas, in a press release.

While declining to reveal what the presale estimates were, the house did indicate to Artnet News that the ruby went to a private collector in the Middle East.

American Gemological Laboratories described the ruby as being of “unequalled uniqueness and importance,” adding that it is “by far the largest ruby of such quality ever produced from Mozambique.”




This 55.22 carat Mozambique ruby is known known as the “Estrela de Fura 55.22.” Courtesy Sotheby’s.

“Estrela de Fura” means “star of Fura” in Portuguese. The name refers to the company that mined the stone and has some nine ruby mining licenses in Mozambique. Just two rubies have ever exceeded $15 million at auction, Sotheby’s says.

The price for the diamond, mined by De Beers at the Damtshaa mine in Botswana, far exceeds the previous high price for a diamond of the same variety, $19.9 million, achieved at Sotheby’s Hong Kong, by a 10.64 carat example.

The Gemological Institute of America described the diamond as “a stunning specimen; one of nature’s great wonders transformed through artistry and ingenuity.”

Because of the “violent and chaotic” events that give rise to a diamond, the auctioneer says, other minerals or inclusions are often trapped within it or cause it to break down into smaller fragments, so it is “unfathomably rare” to find one larger than 10 carats that is free of such impurities. “This is especially true for pink diamonds due to their inherent structural irregularities,” according to Sotheby’s.

Alligator wanders into South Carolina fire station

By Ben Hooper

JUNE 9, 2023




Firefighters in South Carolina said they ejected an unwanted visitor after an alligator wandered into their station.

The Awendaw-McClellanville Consolidated Fire District said in a Facebook post that firefighters at Fire Station 4 in McClellanville found the gator.

The district shared a photo of the alligator wandering near a fire engine parked inside the station.

"Alligators are a big part of the Lowcountry ecosystem and frequently seen outside of firehouses," the district said.

The alligator was ushered outside "without any issues," officials wrote.

[goldie0608]

Stray Dog Found with Tumor Larger than His Head Gets Mass Removed and Finds a Home

"Jake is the absolute best boy and really is living his best life," the Lab's new owner said of the dog's journey




A well-deserving pup is feeling a new spring in his step, thanks to a team of veterinarians at Texas A&M.

According to Texas A&M Today, the 9-year-old Labrador retriever, adorably named Jake from State Farm, was found roaming around Waco, Texas, last year with a large mass on the side of his neck that was bigger than his head. A local rescue group, Long Way Home Adoptables, took him in and found him a foster family, who then consulted with a veterinarian about the tumor.

Recognizing that surgery to remove the substantial mass would be risky, the vet referred the case to Texas A&M's School of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, where doctors diagnosed the mass as adenocarcinoma, a tumor of the salivary gland. The cancerous tumor had spread from the gland up to Jake's ear.

"Salivary gland disease is pretty common, but cancer of the salivary glands is not," Dr. Vanna Dickerson, a VMBS assistant professor, told Texas A&M Today. "In Jake's case, saliva built up because he had this big tumor obstructing his salivary ducts. And it's certainly quite uncommon to have it get as advanced as it was in him."

The school's veterinary specialists decided surgery was the best option to address the tumor. For Jake's surgery — partially funded by generous donors who saw his story on social media — doctors removed as much of the tumor as possible. Because the tumor was large and sitting next to the canine's trachea and esophagus, vets could not remove it all, but they got enough of it to extend Jake's life and make him much more comfortable.



"With any type of tumor, ideally, you would go in and remove it with a margin of normal tissue around it to make sure you're not leaving any cancer cells behind," Dickerson explained to Texas A&M Today. "But because Jake's tumor was so big and next to a lot of really important structures, like the trachea and esophagus, we knew going into it that the surgery was more of a palliative procedure."

"We just wanted to give him a better quality of life for however long his life may be," added April Plemons, Long Way Home's executive director, per ABC's WFAA station.

Jack also underwent a round of chemotherapy to reduce the risk of the cancer returning. Once he recovered, Plemons' staff began searching for a forever home for him. His story had already garnered quite a bit of attention — including from State Farm, which sent a care package to the dog, Plemons told Texas A&M Today.

Among the many calls that Long Way Home received about Jake was a promising one from Josie Brown, a veterinary practice manager with the expertise and resources necessary to provide Jake with any medical treatment he'll need in the future. She took Jake home with open arms.

Sadly, the Lab's tumor has begun to grow again, but Brown is draining it of fluid once a week to keep it from getting too large. She aims to give Jake as much comfort and love as possible after everything he's been through.

"Jake is the absolute best boy and really is living his best life," she gushed to Texas A&M Today. "He never seems to be in pain, and he enjoys being with his people. It didn't take him any time at all to adjust to life with us; it was like he was meant to be here this whole time."

[lush]

45-Year-Old Man Finds Online Success by Posing as a Teenage Girl
04142023*

Nanami Kana (Nanamiかな) looks like a Japanese teenage girl in most of the photos she posts on Twitter, but she recently shocked her fans with photos of herself from 12 years ago in which she appeared as a bearded, overweight man.

A Japanese influencer with around 35,000 Twitter followers, Nanami Kana is actually just the online persona of a 45-year-old father-of-one who simply enjoys putting on women’s clothes and posing as a teenage girl. He does a remarkably good job of it too, as most of the people who visit his Twitter page for the first time declare their disbelief at the fact that he is a man and a 45-year-old one at that. But Nanami really blew her fans’ minds last year, when he first posted photos of himself 12 years ago, revealing that he was over 60 kilograms (132 pounds) heavier than today.


Photos: Nanamiかな/Twitter

Nanami Kana shared an old photo of himself last June, and it immediately went viral. His followers were shocked by his transformation and demanded to know how he pulled it off. It turns out that it all started eight years ago when he weighed a whopping 115 kilograms (253.5 lbs) and his doctor warned him that he was at risk of developing serious health problems.


Photo: Nanamiかな/Twitter

The doctor’s words really made the influencer think about his life, and he started dieting, relying on tofu as the main source of nutrients throughout the day. It took him about five years, but he managed to lose more than half his body weight. He now weighs only 54 kilograms (119 lbs), wears M-size clothes compared to XXL, and even his shoe size went down to 27 cm from 29 cm.

←8年前・・・・・現在→
#ダイエットビフォーアフター
#よかったらダイエットのモチベーション上がる写真載せてくれま せんか
pic.twitter.com/zwjLS3Y2OK

— ℕ (@nanamikana1128) June 24, 2022
After the extreme weight loss, Nanamiかな was also able to fulfill his dream of modeling young women’s clothes and establish a decent online following in the process.


Photo: Nanamiかな/Twitter

“Is this reincarnation into a different world?” one of Nanami Kana’s fans exclaimed.
おはかなち pic.twitter.com/TJFQNPnfiQ

— ℕ (@nanamikana1128) March 26, 2023
“It’s really hard to think that the two are the same person just by looking at the photos,” someone else commented.


Photo: Nanamiかな/Twitter

Posing as young girls is not at all uncommon for Japanese men. In fact, we’ve featured a bunch of them here on Oddity Central, over the years, from popular ‘Cosplay Queen’ Rei Dunois, to the less-known Takuma Tani.

[HogwartsExpress]

Researchers discover that ChatGPT prefers repeating 25 jokes over and over

When tested, "Over 90% of 1,008 generated jokes were the same 25 jokes."


On Wednesday, two German researchers, Sophie Jentzsch and Kristian Kersting, released a paper that examines the ability of OpenAI's ChatGPT-3.5 to understand and generate humor. In particular, they discovered that ChatGPT's knowledge of jokes is fairly limited: During a test run, 90 percent of 1,008 generations were the same 25 jokes, leading them to conclude that the responses were likely learned and memorized during the AI model's training rather than being newly generated.

The two researchers, associated with the Institute for Software Technology, German Aerospace Center (DLR), and Technical University Darmstadt, explored the nuances of humor found within ChatGPT's 3.5 version (not the newer GPT-4 version) through a series of experiments focusing on joke generation, explanation, and detection. They conducted these experiments by prompting ChatGPT without having access to the model's inner workings or data set.

"To test how rich the variety of ChatGPT’s jokes is, we asked it to tell a joke a thousand times," they write. "All responses were grammatically correct. Almost all outputs contained exactly one joke. Only the prompt, 'Do you know any good jokes?' provoked multiple jokes, leading to 1,008 responded jokes in total. Besides that, the variation of prompts did have any noticeable effect."

Their results align with our practical experience while evaluating ChatGPT's humor ability in a feature we wrote that compared GPT-4 to Google Bard. Also, in the past, several people online have noticed that when asked for a joke, ChatGPT frequently returns, "Why did the tomato turn red? / Because it saw the salad dressing."

It's no surprise then that Jentzsch and Kersting found the "tomato" joke to be GPT-3.5's second-most-common result. In the paper's appendix, they listed the top 25 most frequently generated jokes in order of occurrence. Below, we've listed the top 10 with the exact number of occurrences (among the 1,008 generations) in parenthesis:

Q: Why did the scarecrow win an award? (140)
A: Because he was outstanding in his field.

Q: Why did the tomato turn red? (122)
A: Because it saw the salad dressing.

Q: Why was the math book sad? (121)
A: Because it had too many problems.

Q: Why don't scientists trust atoms? (119)
A: Because they make up everything.

Q: Why did the cookie go to the doctor? (79)
A: Because it was feeling crumbly.

Q: Why couldn't the bicycle stand up by itself? (52)
A: Because it was two-tired.

Q: Why did the frog call his insurance company? (36)
A: He had a jump in his car.

Q: Why did the chicken cross the playground? (33)
A: To get to the other slide.

Q: Why was the computer cold? (23)
A: Because it left its Windows open.

Q: Why did the hipster burn his tongue? (21)
A: He drank his coffee before it was cool.

Even so, a small number of the generated responses were unique, but it seems that ChatGPT mostly created them by mixing elements from different jokes it already knows. The researchers found that the language model's original creations didn't always make sense, such as, "Why did the man put his watch in the blender? He wanted to make time fly."

When asked to explain each of the 25 most frequent jokes, ChatGPT mostly provided valid explanations according to the researchers' methodology, indicating an "understanding" of stylistic elements such as wordplay and double meanings. However, it struggled with sequences that didn't fit into learned patterns and couldn't tell when a joke wasn't funny. Instead, it would make up fictional yet plausible-sounding explanations.

For example, when asked to explain a nonsensical joke it generated ("Can you explain why this joke is funny: Why did the cookie go to the gym? To get a-cookie-dized."), ChatGPT wrote, "The joke is a play on words. To get 'a-cookie-dized' is a pun on the phrase 'to get categorized,' with 'cookie' being substituted for 'categorized.' The joke is that the cookie is going to the gym to become more fit and healthy, as if it were a person, but this is also implying that the cookie is trying to fit into a certain category or mold."

In general, Jentzsch and Kersting found that ChatGPT's detection of jokes was heavily influenced by the presence of joke "surface characteristics" like a joke's structure, the presence of wordplay, or inclusion of puns, showing a degree of "understanding" of humor elements.

Reacting to the study on Twitter, Scale AI prompt engineer Riley Goodside blamed ChatGPT's lack of humor on reinforcement learning through human feedback (RLHF), a technique that guides language model training by gathering human feedback: "The most visible effect of RLHF is that the model follows orders, and base LLMs are much harder to prompt in practice. But that benefit isn’t free—you pay for it in creativity, more or less."

Despite ChatGPT's limitations in joke generation and explanation, the researchers pointed out that its focus on content and meaning in humor indicates progress toward a more comprehensive research understanding of humor in language models:

"The observations of this study illustrate how ChatGPT rather learned a specific joke pattern instead of being able to be actually funny," the researchers write. "Nevertheless, in the generation, the explanation, and the identification of jokes, ChatGPT’s focus bears on content and meaning and not so much on superficial characteristics. These qualities can be exploited to boost computational humor applications. In comparison to previous LLMs, this can be considered a huge leap toward a general understanding of humor."

Jentzsch and Kersting plan to continue studying humor in large language models, specifically evaluating OpenAI's GPT-4 in the future. Based on our experience, they'll likely find that GPT-4 also likes to joke about tomatoes.

source: https://arstechnica.com/information-tec ... -and-over/

[Fatima99]

I sometimes get REALLY DEPRESSED reviewing the news these days.
It's always about a global pandemic threatening life as we know it,
protests around the world, stupid politicians, natural disasters,
or some other really bad story.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

Welcome to The mobi weekly news magazine
IN OTHER NEWS
SATURDAY JUNE 10
What is it?
Here is your chance to become an "ACE REPORTER" for our weekly news magazine.
It is your job to fine weird, funny or "good feel" stories from around the world and share them with our readers in our weekly magazine

How do you play?
Just post a story that you have come across that made you smile, laugh, feel good...
BUT NOTHING DEPRESSING

EXAMPLE POST

​Naked sunbather chases wild boar through park after it steals his laptop bag

A naked sunbather was seen chasing wild boar through a park after it stole his laptop bag.
Amusing photographs from Germany show the man running after the animal to try and claim the plastic bag back.
But the cheeky boar and its two piglets appear to be too quick for the sunbather, who can't keep up with their speedy little trotters.
As the incident unfolds, groups of friends and family sat on the grass watch on and laugh.
Heads are seen turning in surprise and amusement in the hilarious photographs.
The incident happened at Teufelssee Lake - a bathing spot in the Grunwell Forest in Berlin, Germany.

Rules:
Each Edition of IN OTHER NEWS will be open for 7 days...
You can post as many stories as you like, but you will only get paid for One Story in any 24 hour period
So in other words, you can only earn WRZ$ once a day.
Each news day will start when I post announcing it
OR at:
9:00 AM CHICAGO TIME (UTC -6)
3:00 PM GMT (UTC -0)
on those days I space out and forget to post or can't due to Real Life
Stories may be accompanied with images - but No big images, please! 800x800 pixels wide maximum
Videos are allowed, but please keep them short, and post a short summary for those that don't like to click on videos
No Duplicate stories - Where a post has been edited resulting in duplicates, then the last one in time gets disallowed.
And please limit this to reasonably family friendly stories

Reward:
Each news story posted that I feel is acceptable (must be a real story, too few words or simply a headline are not considered acceptable) will earn you 50 WRZ$
If you post multiple stories on any given day, you will only earn 50 WRZ$ for the first story of the Day
All payments will be made at THE END of the weekly news cycle.
Special Bonus - Each week I will award "The Pulitzer Prize" for the best story of the week
The weekly winner of the "The Pulitzer Prize" will receive a 100 WRZ$ bonus
It's just my personal opinion, so my judgement is final

So help bring GOOD news to the members of mobi, and join our reporting team...

IN OTHER NEWS

[ozswede]

Firewalking lesson where Norwegian teachers encouraged pupils to walk barefoot across hot coals puts seven of them in hospital

A physics lesson in Norway where teachers encouraged teenage pupils to walk barefoot across hot coals went disastrously wrong when seven children ended up in hospital with burns.

An investigation has been launched after the fire-walking 'experiment' during a physics class, which parents say they were never consulted about.

Some of the injured students – all boys – had to be given morphine for the pain following the stunt, which their physics teacher and headmaster also participated in.


An investigation has been launched after the fire-walking 'experiment'

One parent of a 17-year-old student told reporters that the first they knew of the fire walk was when their son called from the school and had to be taken to hospital for 2nd degree burns and heavy blistering on the soles of his feet after walking on the 500C embers.

'We were never consulted about this,' said the parent, who declined to be named, 'and the school seemed to brush off our objections by saying 'the pupils all agreed', which is not good enough.'


Some of the injured students – all boys – had to be given morphine for the pain following the stunt

Now the headmaster of St Olav's secondary school in Stavanger, Norway, Karl Roar Vigmostad, has announced an inquiry into the fire walk (that he personally took part in! )

A group of boys in the mixed physics class proposed the experiment to test a scientific phenomenon called the Leidenfrost effect, which some scientists believe occurs during firewalking.

At high temperatures, water vapour is said to form a protective layer, lessening the chance of injury but other experts believe water can make pieces of the burning embers stick to the soles of the feet.

In any case, according to one parent, the boys' suggestion that they should dip their feet in cold water before stepping onto the coals was overruled at the last minute by physics teacher Vidar Furholt.

According to the parent, Mr Furholt, who performed the fire walk last, along with Mr Vigmostad, received blisters himself as a result, but made light of them the next day.

'They also suggested in their proposal that a first aid kit should be on hand, but it wasn't,' said the parent. 'The nearest one was in the headmaster's office. We had to find a doctor to get approval to take our son to the hospital's burns unit, where he was given a double dose of morphine.

'The doctors said the blisters should heal, but the biggest fear is that they might become infected. In my opinion the school behaved very irresponsibly. It's all been very upsetting.'


Physics teacher Vidar Furholt also participated in the fire-walking 'experiment'

Headmaster Mr Vigmostad told local paper Stavanger Aftenblad following the incident on Thursday: 'This went wrong – it's not good. We take this episode seriously'.

He added: 'It's too early to say what happened. Our first priority was taking care of and following up the students.

'We will investigate more closely and discover why it ended the way it did. There is much to learn from such an incident. ' (I know it's awful, but I couldn't stop laughing.)

He told the newspaper that no ambulance was called to the school and students were encouraged to see a doctor themselves and the school helped to facilitate that by contacting the local hospital.'

[Fatima99]

Dog owner in stitches over photo delivery driver left as proof of postage



Missing a parcel delivery is annoying - especially when you've been camped out at your front door for weeks waiting for it to arrive. But one dog owner got a good laugh after reviewing their 'proof of postage' status to see their "ferocious" pooch took in their delivery.

Sharing an adorable snap on Reddit, the owner said: "Delivery person made sure to include my dog in the proof of delivery picture - such ferocity." In the image, a white dog is seen barking at a delivery driver with a parcel at its feet.

Thankfully for the driver, the pooch is standing on the other side of a clear door unable to chase him down the driveway on his way back to his van. Commenting on the cute picture, one user said: "This is cracking me up. The longer I look at it, the funnier it gets."



Another user added: "Did they scare you at all? That welcome mat looks like it was torn apart by a ferocious beast."

A third user said: "Hehehe - look at the little teeth."

One more user added: "Your dog is like 'You can leave that package and your wallet too'."

It comes after Paul Conway, 61, bought some sunglasses online but was beaten to the door by his labrador, Mazie, when the courier arrived.

The dog was captured in the proof of delivery photo, peeking her head out the door and looking up at the parcel.

The married dad-of-one said: "It looks as though they are delivering it to my dog. I found it quite funny as all you can see is the dog looking up at the package in courier’s hand."

Paul, who lives with his wife Jane, welcomed eight-year-old Mazie in to their home when she was just a tiny puppy.

Explaining how she isn't quite skilled enough to unlock the door herself, Paul added: "The courier knocked on the door and my wife opened it to receive the package.

"But she was behind the door still so they just took a photo of our dog."

‘Mini tornado’ sends boy inside inflatable bubble soaring through sky



Police are investigating a freak accident involving a boy who was catapulted 20 feet into the air after a mini-tornado crossed his path.

The heart-stopping incident happened June 4 while the boy was playing inside of an inflatable “zorb” ball, at a food and wine festival in Southampton, UK.

The 9-year-old was seriously injured by the phenomenon, reported the Liverpool Echo, and is under close medical observation.

The weather pattern is known as a “dust devil.” According to the National Weather Service, the vortex of dirt may reach heights of 1,000 feet and travel between 10 and 300 feet, dissipating after just a few minutes.

A witness, Paul Holmes, said he was at the festival at the time and rushed to the boy at the moment he took off into the air.

The 43-year-old Southport resident told the Echo that he counted two zorb balls flying in his peripheral vision.

“I just screamed at the top of my voice ‘there’s a kid in one of those balls, someone catch him,’ ” he said. “The minute I shouted ‘there’s a boy in the sky’ the staff at the inflatable place were quick to get all of the kids out of the remaining balls in the pit.”

Police say the boy is in serious but stable condition at a local hospital.

A spokesperson for the area’s city council issued a statement, reported by several local outlets, which read: “We can confirm that an air ambulance was called to Victoria Park, Southport, this afternoon (Sunday 4 June) following an accident within the grounds.”

“First aid responders from St. Johns Ambulance reacted quickly to provide assistance to the person involved prior to the arrival of other emergency services.

“Following the incident, a full health and safety inspection has been undertaken at the Southport Food and Drink Festival and the event remains open to the public.

https://nypost.com/2023/06/07/mini-torn ... rough-sky/

“Our thoughts are with those involved in the accident and we wish them a full recovery.”

A Rare Fra Angelico Painting Will Be Offered at Auction for the Second Time Ever



Fra Angelico, a friar of the Dominican order, painter of the Early Renaissance, and patron saint of Catholic artists, embodied an essential shift in the history of Western painting, mastering perspective and creating more humanistic portrayals of holy scenes. His work has only gone to auction twice in the past century, with his panel Saint Dominic and the Stigmatization of Saint Francis selling at a Christie’s auction last year for $4.7 million. This summer, another work of Fra Angelico will be offered by the auction house during an Old Master’s evening sale on July 7th.

The Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John the Baptist and the Magdalen at the Foot of the Cross is an early work of Fra Angelico’s, thought to be painted sometime between 1419 and 1424 by the six scholars who have analyzed the work. It is the middle panel in a commissioned work for an unknown patron.

“It was a thrilling moment when I realized I was in the presence of an early masterpiece by Fra Angelico,” said Francis Russell, Christie’s UK Deputy Chairman, in a press release. “This panel exemplifies his deep religious conviction. Intensely personal, it also expresses his understanding of the revolutionary achievement of the great Florentine sculptors of his time.”

Russell refers to Fra Angelico’s use of perspective in his depiction of Christ on the cross. Previously, depictions of this scene with a straight on point of view often included a view of the right hand side of the post, which, if rendered correctly, should not be visible. This false perspective was common even among the masters of that time, including Cimabue, Ugolino di Nerio, and Giotto. Fra Angelico’s correct modeling of perspective is said to be the result of his studying the works of Tuscan sculptors like Ghiberti and Brunelleschi who had advanced the art’s understanding of 3D figures, from perspective to the rendering of folds in cloth.

The work is also an example of Fra Angelico’s use of color. In some aspects, Fra Angelico was limited by convention, the Virgin Mary’s dress must be blue and Mary Magdalene’s dress pink, but he found other ways to impose his own sense of color composition, such as painting the blood of Christ in the same tones as the pelican’s pierced breast and Magdalene’s robe.

“With Fra Angelico nothing was accidental,” concluded Russell.

[goldie0608]

Cancer Screening Could Predict Tumors Decades Before They Start Growing Thanks to This Discovery



After scientists identified a link between the risk of cancer and clusters of chemicals in an individual’s cells, a screening program that could detect tumors decades in advance is on the horizon.

The chemicals are called circular RNAs, and when they stick to DNA strands in great enough numbers they can cause tumors known as oncogenes.

The breakthrough offers hope of developing personalized vaccines for vulnerable patients.

“Environmental and genetic factors have long been believed as the major contributors to cancer,” explains lead author Professor Simon Conn, of Flinders University in Australia. “We call this revolutionary finding ‘ER3D’ —from endogenous RNA-directed DNA damage’. It ushers in an entirely new area of medical and molecular biology research.

“[It] opens the door for using these molecules as markers of disease at a very early stage, where the likelihood of curing cancers is much higher.”

The study compared neonatal blood tests, or ‘Guthrie cards’, of babies who went on to develop acute leukemia as infants.

One specific circular RNA was present at much higher levels at birth, prior to the onset of symptoms, compared to peers with healthy blood.

The findings suggest it’s the abundance of the circular RNA molecules which is a major determinant for why some develop these specific oncogenes and others do not.

“These specific circular RNAs can bind to DNA at many different locations across a range of cells,” said Dr. Conn. “By binding to the DNA at specific sites, these circular RNAs cause a number of changes culminating in the breakage of the DNA which the cell must repair in order to survive.

“This repair is not always perfect and this can result in small mutations, like a misspelled word within a book, or worse, very, very large and devastating mutations.”

Multiple circular RNAs appear to act in partnership causing breaks at multiple sites in the DNA.

“This process called chromosomal translocation, is a major problem for the cell as it results in gene fusions which can actually convert the cell from a normal cell into a cancerous cell,” said Dr. Vanessa Conn, Simon’s wife, and lead author on the paper.

“This was demonstrated in two different cell types and it was found that this drove the rapid onset of aggressive leukemia.”

Gene fusions arising from circular RNAs are at well-known ‘hotspots’ of mutation in leukemia, say the husband and wife team.

This is an important consideration in Australia which has the highest incidence in the world, with around 35,000 currently living with the disease.

These gene fusions have been used by doctors around the world for many years in guiding treatment options as they are known to worsen the prognosis for the patient who carries them.

However, until now it was unknown how these mutations arose, even though more than 100 known fusions were found in patients.

The next step say the researcher partners is to see if these fusions are present in other cancers.